You Will Not Rattle Us Apart, Ryan Ross // Vol. VI
VOL. VI: Monday
He goes to work in the morning wearing a collared shirt he stole out of Jon’s closet, drinking Jon’s terrible burnt-ass coffee, feeling like an entirely different person.
Like a sadder person. A person who has a (potential) tour and a (sort of) studio, but no home and angry friends and no boyfriend.
He sits in his cubby and stares at a film as it plays at one-sixtieth speed, not really doing much of anything about the clicks and glitches, dust on the tape, dots on the screen. He just lets it go. Watches it as it is.
Maybe it jolts him awake, or maybe just back to reality when Joanie comes and stands by his desk, preceded by the smell of baby powder. “Ryan,” she says, looking down through her glasses at him, “I have to ask you a question.”
He looks up at her, wondering if in her wise ancient ways she will notice that his entire world is falling apart around his ears.
She says, “Were you the last person in the building on Friday?”
“Yes,” he doesn’t correct her by saying he was there until Saturday, actually. “I guess so.”
“You know, this is my fault.” Joanie is unreadable. She sounds sad, but she looks angry. Ryan can’t even try to figure out where she’s going, he just knows it’s bad. He has a talent for presaging disaster, after all. She says: “I didn’t realize you were still here when I left, I was in such a hurry.”
Ryan straightens in his chair. “What happened?”
“It seems the front door didn’t get shut up properly,” she says it in passive voice, but it’s an accusation with a foregone judgment appended.
Ryan doesn’t say anything. He rattled it, he remembers shaking it. Of course he locked it. But then again, maybe he didn’t.
“Nothing terrible happened,” she says. “Robyn found some men sleeping in the theater when she came in and opened up the box office for the matinee. They were polite, they left when she asked.”
Ryan says, “That’s good, I guess.”
Joanie says, “It could have been much worse. There were some reels just sitting around in there - Hayman, Argento. A government piece from 1942 worth, I don’t know, about ten thousand at auction.”
Ryan tries to meet her eyes, but his voice shakes a bit. It surprises him, that he feels this terrible, that he has the capacity for the added hurt. “I meant to put those back.”
Joanie’s voice is cool, “Regardless, Ryan. This is your job, not your living room. These aren’t rentals that you can leave lying around for your cat to piss on. In fact, they’re not yours to watch at all.” She makes a gesture at the short that’s currently spooling on his screen: “These are archival pieces. We are preserving them as a record of the art, for the benefit of future generations.”
Of course Ryan is a big picture person, he knows this. So it’s only out of perversity that he says: “But what’s the point of keeping them if no one ever watches them?”
She gives him his last week’s pay with her best wishes.
.
Ryan doesn’t know what you’re supposed to do at 11:00 a.m. on a Monday when you’re homeless and unemployed, but expected to show up for a recording session with your band and your ex-boyfriend in ten hours so that you can maybe go on a national tour in six weeks.
He figures you go to the movies.
So he cashes his check - $304.23 - and spends twenty dollars on a 3D movie about guinea pigs who are also spies. He’s the only person in the theatre besides a nanny and her two pre-preschoolers, and he smugly eats his popcorn and gives Joanie a mental lecture about how art without an audience is not art at all. This movie is better art than the Grekul shorts, because it has an audience that laughs at the jokes. And making the best music in the world is pointless if you’re not playing shows to a group of beating hearts and open eyes. Cataloging and cleaning a film reel of roadside grass is the work of a mortician, and children laughing is as vital as the sweat and stink of a riot of dancing bodies.
If anyone has learned that, it’s him.
On some level, he’s glad he got fired for that infraction, out of all of them. It almost makes it seem like he has values. A vision that he’s pursuing beyond his sex drive and his lust for glory. Artistic integrity.
Ryan decides he’ll send Joanie an email clarifying his point whenever he gets his laptop back from Brendon.
And then Ryan spends the rest of the movie thinking about Brendon, forgetting to laugh at the jokes.
.
At 9:07, Ryan is staring at the sharpied sign on the door of Astrobase Go, trying to decide which of the five potential faces that might open the door he dreads seeing the least. Eventually, he decides on Jackson’s rakish receding hairline: least cause to be angry at him, but not as scary as Doc.
But it’s Brendon who opens the door. He looks like he didn’t sleep, he looks ragged.
“Hi,” he says, “How are you?”
Ryan shrugs. “I got fired this morning,” he says. And then feels dumb because he told himself he wouldn’t tell anyone, wouldn’t play for sympathy or let them judge his ability to fuck up his entire life in five days flat.
“What for?” Brendon asks, “I thought you said your boss loved you.”
“I don’t know,” Ryan says. “I guess it was because of Friday night. It doesn’t matter.”
Ryan watches a shadow cross Brendon’s face at the oblique mention of Zach. He looks pained, which is painful to Ryan.
“You should come in, I guess,” Brendon steps aside, then follows Zach around the corner to the sound booth.
Doc’s sitting there, fiddling hunchbacked over the board. He doesn’t look up. “Don’t mind me,” he says.
Brendon says, “We’re gonna want to start soon, if that’s okay.”
Doc says, “Yup,” and doesn’t stop what he’s doing.
Brendon turns to Ryan. “I brought your guitar up.”
“Thanks,” Ryan says, even though he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with it, after. Bring it to Jon’s place? Jon’s not going to let him stay there forever. The futon is a little small for a half-straight dude and an idiot fuckup to share.
They stand there watching Doc for half a minute. Just as Ryan’s wondering when Spencer and Jon are going to show up, Brendon shifts his feet and levels a look at the side of Ryan’s face. Ryan raises an eyebrow and looks sideways at him.
Brendon says, “I want to ask you something, and I want an honest answer.”
Ryan says, warily: “Okay.”
Brendon feet planted for the worst, says, “Why did you break up with me?”
Ryan snorts, tries to sound sardonic: “Oh, so now I broke up with you.”
“Uh, yeah. You were there? You said, ‘by the way, I may or may not have cheated on you twice.’”
Doc straightens up from the board. “I’m done,” he says. “I’m going now.”
Ryan says, “That is not what I said.”
Brendon says, “Well you sure didn’t make it any clearer than that. I want your list of reasons. I want to know why.”
Ryan tries to summon up his vast database of incontrovertible evidence that the relationship was dead on its feet, and that Brendon was only staying out of pity and habit, but he comes up with nothing. “You were going to do it to me, anyway,” he mutters.
Brendon piles his hands on the crown of his head, clenches his eyes shut and says, “What the fuck, Ryan.”
Ryan glances up, catches Brendon’s hot and frustrated face, then looks back down. “I figured you were leaving the band because your job was - whatever, more satisfying and lucrative and actually, you know, meant that people were listening to the music you wanted to make - and I knew you were sick of me. I thought I’d at least try to save the band if I couldn’t-” he breaks off. Have you sounds so pitiful.
Brendon’s eyebrows are so far up his forehead that he can’t even speak. “You are the stupidest person I know, Ryan Ross. You are such a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah,” Ryan says. At least they can agree on that.
“Have you even noticed how far you got without me?” Brendon’s voice is loud, he’s kind of shouting. “One day and you’re two dollars and thirty five cents away from the homeless shelter and some pervert putting his hands in your pants while you sleep,”
Ryan shrugs, “It’s more action than I get at home.”
Brendon ignores that. “Except I don’t know how you’d earn that money, because if I hadn’t dragged it down here, you wouldn’t have a guitar to busk with. You’d have to squeegee town cars or something.”
“Probably,” Ryan agrees.
“And is your new - boyfriend, whatever.” Brendon takes a breath, “Is he even any good in bed? Or are you avoiding him already? Why aren’t you staying with him?”
“Actually,” says Ryan, only just admitting this to himself - he awkward handshake, the surprised kiss - “I’m pretty sure he’s straight.”
Brendon pokes a finger into Ryan’s chest so hard that he kind of stumbles backwards. “You cheated on me with a straight guy? How do you even do that?”
Ryan rubs at his collarbone. “Well, I wasn’t exactly sure until yesterday-”
Brendon is glaring.
Ryan doesn’t say anything. He seems to have run out of steam on the excuses he’s made for himself. He knows what this boils down to: he did what he wanted to do. No one’s fault but his own, and look what havoc he wreaked in the process, what hearts he broke.
Brendon is looking at him like he’s stupid, yes, and selfish. But he also looks present, for once. Not distant like before, but close and like he cares about the gulf of repercussions swirling underneath their dangling feet, ready to swallow them whole.
Brendon sits down in the chair in front of the sound board and puts his head in his hands and says to the dials: “I know how you think, Ryan. I know you think you need to buy everyone’s love and affection. I’ve known that since the day I met you and you tried to get me drunk before you’d even ask me to join your stupid band. Your problem is that you never know what people want. You think straight dudes want to fuck you and Mormons want you to bootleg for them. You think people need incentives to think you’re worth something, even though everyone can see what a talented asshole you are right from the start.”
Ryan doesn’t say anything. He sinks onto the dirty couch and tries hard to not let the words penetrate, tries hard not to listen.
“I don’t need you to bribe me, Ryan,” Brendon says. “I love you. I don’t need you to fuck me just so I’ll stay in the band.”
Ryan can barely even comprehend the statement, it seems so alien. Maybe it explains this dry spell, these months of sex acts performed like strangers in public spaces. Brendon won’t fuck him like a lover because Ryan’s been treating him like a dubious business partner. Someone to be incentivized rather than wooed. Ryan can't help but retort “Yeah, but maybe I need you to fuck me if we’re going to stay in this relationship.”
Brendon looks up. “Is that even on the table anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan says. He doesn’t. He looks at Brendon, who looks like he's swallowed a whole bottle of contraband hope.
One or the other of them gets up, and they kiss so softly that it feels like a straining high note, ready to warble and collapse.
Brendon puts his hands on Ryan’s face, his thumbs brushing the tips of Ryan’s ears and make a sad, musical sound in his chest that makes Ryan bury his face in Brendon’s shirt. He grasps at Brendon’s shoulders with his fists and pulls them both together harder, moving his face up to mouth at Brendon’s throat, his adam’s apple.
Brendon opens his mouth and the sound in his chest comes out as a moan, and Ryan pushes harder. Ryan pushes him against the glass of the sound booth and keeps working his mouth, pulling up Brendon’s shirt to lick up his belly and thumb his nipples, kiss them, suck them. He grabs Brendon’s ass through his jeans and rubs their crotches together and knows that this isn’t enough.
Ryan knows they are both getting hard, frustrated and angry and horny as they are, and so he does it before Brendon can stop him, not even knowing if it’s what Brendon wants. He’s been rejected so often that he almost doesn’t care. He gets his hands between them and undoes belts, buttons, flies, and is on his knees with Brendon’s balls in his mouth, Brendon’s cock hot against his cheek in a second.
Brendon says, “God, yes,” and arcs back into it, his head banging against the glass while Ryan uses a hand to slide Brendon’s cock past a vice of wet lips deep into his throat. Brendon can’t stop making noises. He goes “Yes, yes, yes,” with each thrust and Ryan is looking up at him, feeling strange and happy and guilty.
He stops, suddenly, and pulls off of Brendon’s cock, giving it a parting lick with his tongue. Brendon cracks an eye and looks down questioningly, and Ryan goes, “Jon and Spencer?” and Brendon snorts: “I never invited them.”
Ryan has always kept a bottle of lube in his guitar case, along with his picks and capo. He goes for it.
Brendon sits down on the couch, his jeans around his knees and his dick lying wet and red against his belly. He flexes his stomach and his dick sways like a tree, and he looks at Ryan and says, “Come here.”
Ryan is obedient, and as Brendon manuevers him onto the couch, on his knees with his elbows on the arm and his ass in Brendon’s face, he closes his eyes and lets Brendon open him up with his tongue.
He can’t remember the last time Brendon fucked him. Maybe just once or twice, a long time ago when they were eager to do everything, try everything, when they’d stay up all night fucking and napping and playing records for each other and fucking again. He wants it, now. “Please,” he says, his eyes squeezed closed because even now asking seems like such a risk. He's still so afraid of this falling apart: “Put your cock in me.”
Brendon doesn’t seem to hear. Brendon’s tongue working in his ass is making his dick ache, and as Brendon buries his face, he reaches around and tugs on it. “You want it?” he asks when he takes a breath.
“Please,” Ryan says again.
Brendon almost laughs, “You’re going to get me fired.”
Ryan doesn’t look back, he just lets his head hang and says, “Good.”
There is a pause, and then Brendon is pulling him backwards until Ryan is straddling him on the couch. Brendon adjusts under him, his cock in his hand, and he’s staring at Ryan with this look on his face: a trace of a smile, concentration, a certain victorious air. "I like my job, Ryan, I don't want to lose it."
Ryan rolls his eyes, petulant: "You like it so much you want to fuck a pair of guys older than your grandfather? I swear, they're like, forty."
"No." Brendon's voice is sharp, he pins Ryan down with a glare. "I want to fuck you." Brendon's cock pushes in, slippery and feeling huge, bigger than Ryan's ability to comprehend it.
Ryan closes his fists over Brendon's shoulder and drops his head, struggling not to whine that it hurts, that he wants more. He closes his eyes against Brendon’s voice, which is shredded and just barely controlled: "I want to fuck you," he repeats, and he punctuates the statement with an illustrative thrust. "I want you, and I want this band, I want this job, and I want us all to be happy about it."
Ryan pulls his head back to wince at the ceiling as his hips give a fraction wider and Brendon pushes deepest. His cock between them is wet at the tip and Brendon takes it in his hand and jerks it a little. He is slack-handed and ineffective, though, as Ryan squeezes tighter around him, pushing down and back.
“God, Ryan,” Brendon hisses. “Fucking god.”
Ryan wants to say something clever, like are you still sure you don’t want me to bribe you to stay in the band? but all he can manage is “Told you so.”
For that, Brendon gives a thrust that flares through Ryan like the light off a struck match, and then there is some more jerking and Brendon’s voice is ragged with want, and then they’re both coming. Together, Ryan’s come all over Brendon’s chest, and Brendon with his head lolled back against the couch as he jerks up into Ryan, making an incoherent sound.
There is a long pause, then. Elbows on chests and breath in each other's hair and the smell of sweat and come over everything. Ryan pulls off and stands up, weak-kneed as a colt, itching as Brendon’s come slowly rolls down the inside of one thigh.
Ryan takes another look at the natty couch and says, “We’re probably not the first to defile that thing.”
“No,” says Brendon, “I’m pretty sure it defiled us.”
Ryan shuffles into the other room and finds some paper towel. He wipes himself off as best he can, then brings some back for Brendon. He makes to pull his pants back on but instead just collapses back down onto the couch, sticky and naked and intertwined with Brendon’s limbs.
Ryan says, “You’re right” as if they’re still in the middle of a conversation. And then Ryan says: “I want everything. I want you and the band, I want my boyfriend and my accordion player.”
“I want you to come home.” Brendon doesn’t hesitate, the words are flat on the table immediately. He puts his head on Ryan’s shoulder and says into the air, “I’m bribing you to be my boyfriend again.”
Ryan says, “Does that mean I can bribe you to stay in the band?”
Brendon says, “I was never leaving, asshole. You know I was never leaving.”
.
Cont’d from P. 1:
DON’T PANIC YET: Or, how Panic at the Disco Became Everyone’s Favorite Brooklyn Band // L. Goodman
The members of Panic at the Disco have never worried about seeming lame, which may be why people think they’re cool. The band’s first demo-turned-album, 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, came out at a moment when it was good to be weird and gay and from Brooklyn. Fans hooked on the defiant inscrutability of Animal Collective or the dense soundscapes of TV on the Radio were quick to embrace a similarly adventurous but more intimate sound. By the time they released Pretty. Odd in 2008 it became clear they were not just the latest quirky collective. Their songs had the egghead production of art-school bands like Talking Heads and the complex vocal harmonies of a Baroque choir but were driven by irresistibly sweet pop melodies. Their third album, Amargosa, out later this month, perfects this hybrid. In the same way that the band members themselves exude a beguiling purity of spirit-they’re cheerful queer nerds, not brooding hipsters-so does Amargosa exude a basic human warmth that is deeply seductive.
Urie’s voice is a full-bodied, multi-octave-reaching instrument reminiscent of the more-earnest end-of-eighties New Wave, supporting Ross’ lyrical songwriting and the layered harmonies that pervade all of their albums. “Before we had Brendon I was insecure about my voice and what that meant for our songs,” Ross remembers. “I still am. Nothing we do would work without his range. I mean, thank god for Brendon.” His bandmates laugh, if only because Panic is noted for being a strange animal: all four members are paired off in relationships with each other. Of course, the subject of their couple-dom is strictly off-limits in interviews, even though Ross and Urie are quite obviously holding hands under the table.
Back in 2004, with the support of his bandmates’ notable talent, Ross took a backseat with supporting vocals while the group wrote a collection of tortured and weird but very beautiful songs. Ross, Urie and Smith were still fresh from Vegas when they met Walker, who was playing with experimental noise collectives and understood the technical side of recording. Ross asked him to help them complete what would become A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (Walker co-wrote one song, helped clean up the recordings, and demonstrated some breakneck strumming on banjo and bass).
“That album is this weird faded Polaroid of our past,” Ross says. “It was functionally a demo, but when we re-recorded it the next year we barely changed anything about the arrangements, we just added a few new songs. Everything felt fully realized at the time because I didn’t really know what I was doing, but in retrospect, I’m like, Jesus, those songs are crazy! What the hell is going on?”
As incomplete as the material on the band’s debut now sounds, it defines Panic’s ethos: intricately arranged music made accessible by the simple structure underneath. As might be expected for a debut album on a tiny label by an unknown artist, Fever was initially ignored. It took a year and the re-release in 2005 for it to get the critical notice it deserved, gushed over by influential music sites like Pitchfork. But more significant was the reaction of fellow musicians. A short national tour with influential scenesters Beirut was just the start for their status as musician’s musicians. A year or so after Fever came out the second time, the label Decaydance re-reissued the record as a double album featuring a second disc composed entirely of remixes by arty and well-known musicians (Final Fantasy, Stars) and arty but not-so-well-known musicians (Son Lux, A.M. Radio).
Just as fans form a fiercely personal attachment to this music, other bands find putting their own mark on a Panic tune to be really satisfying. Owen Pallett, a.k.a. Final Fantasy, tried to explain how he was instantly won over by the band: “I ducked into the Ship and was surprised to see them playing. I’m not exactly sure what caused the magic. I think, like for most people, it’s pretty stunning to hear something that you’ve always wanted but never knew existed.”
The remix album’s success put the band in the center of the emerging Brooklyn scene, though they do not like to talk about it. “We really hate commenting about, like, our stature,” Ross explains. “Because if you’re talking about being in the scene and being a leader and self-referencing in this weird ranking system of how big you are or how small you are or who likes you, it inherently sounds douchey. And okay, I’m a douche anyway, but these days I try really hard to focus on the music instead of the politics.”
To make Amargosa (named for a small river north of Las Vegas that only flows when it rains), Panic isolated themselves for three weeks at the former Prime Studios, an estate in the Catskills where there was nothing to do but cook and make music. (Jon Walker brought his tofu deep fryer.) The lack of distraction and remote, Shining-esque vibe resulted in maximum collaboration. “The songs were presented as open for change, as opposed to being like, 'This song is done, let’s record it,'” Urie says. The result is a record that’s just as delicate, as sensual, and as off-kilter as Pretty. Odd but more direct and easily comprehensible. In the past, Panic’s philosophy was "more is more" - an extra layer of harmony or weird sample would compensate for any moment of creative uncertainty. On Amargosa, their confidence has clearly grown to the point where they don’t need to bother with that kind of neurotic detail.
When in the city, Panic work out of a private rehearsal space. They call it “the Compound” - a private joke which refers to their first home in Brooklyn, an all-vegan housing co-op that was shut down in 2007 due to rezoning. “We try as much as we can, but we can’t keep our personal lives separate from our music.” Ross explains, “They’re inextricable. So we just go with it. We sleep there half the time and all our shit’s there and it’s really just our home base. We love it.”
Happy and in love, Panic at the Disco are secure in their coolness, their in-jokes, their side-projects and their status as everyone's favorite Brooklyn band. Urie contemplates the question of their next move with a wave of a forkful of his vegan pumpkin pie: "I don't know, we'll probably do whatever Ryan says. He's got a list in his wallet. Show them the list, Ry."
Rolling his eyes, Ross pulls out a tattered slip of paper blackened with illegible scribbles. "I try to keep five goals on it at all times," he explains sheepishly, tucking it away.
So Panic's future stays a mystery to New York Magazine's readership, but from past experience, we can count on it being a bright one.
END.